chadfowler.com Archives - 02 August 2015, Sunday

As a young self-taught software developer, one of the first books I remember reading was Steve McConnell’s Software Project Survival Guide: How to Be Sure Your First Important Project Isn’t Your Last . Who knows why I picked that one of all the possible books but I somehow knew I want...

Leaving a Legacy…System 2011.03.17 12:00 am Ever since reading David Heinemeir Hansson’s post Enterprise Is the New Legacy over five years ago, I’ve been chewing on something. The gist of the post was that “enterprise” is and should be a bad word, just like “legacy”. But why is “legac...

Semil Shah did a nice job of pulling highlights from a recent interview with Sir Michael Moritz in Foreign Affairs. This one struck me as a particularily useful checklist for would-be entrepreneurs. What makes a world-class entrepreneur? Michael Moritz says: Clarity of thought. The ab...

As you interact with other people in the world, you either generate energy or you deplete it. In a team environment, there are people who always bring the team’s energy level up. When they are absent, you miss it. They somehow direct the flow of conversation and events from dead ends ...

What do the following have in common? Agile Software Development Six Sigma Behavior Driven Development Software Craftsmanship DevOps Each of these represents a good idea that a group of well-meaning people tried (and succeeded) to spread into the world. Each is generally poorly define...

Go Ahead and Complain 2008.12.17 Twitter is an excellent service for allowing people to vent. I’d guess a large percentage of the messages that pump through the site are complaints about something (technology, airlines, restaurants, etc.). I know I’ve posted my share of complaints. A ...

Always carry a power strip in your suitcase. Great for international trips to avoid having to buy multiple adapters. But even in your home country, hotels can be really bad about providing enough outlets. I have one of these which fits nicely in a suitcase or laptop bag without taking...

While in India, we were fearless. We walked the back streets of Bangalore where westerners don’t go. We weren’t afraid to find our own transportation or do our own business anywhere, despite the huge cultural differences and language barriers. And when we went up North where everyone ...

What’s the difference between automation and outsourcing? I don’t know if it’s the same everywhere, but here in the USA we’re deluged with fear-driven “news” reporting, decrying the theft or export of our jobs to low cost, less skilled, offshore labor. Or even onshore “illegal” labor....

40 is a confusing age. Old enough to not be a kid anymore by any reasonable definition. Still young, inexperienced, and stupid enough to feel like one anyway. Maybe that last bit never goes away. Maybe it only intensifies. One feature of my version of me at 40 is that I have gradually...

It may seem like a nitpick, but as a Ruby programmer I want to use APIs that look like Ruby code. “fbsession.users_getInfo()” looks like PHP code to my eyes. It’s no surprise. Facebook is written in PHP , and its HTTP /XML API was designed by the same PHP programmers that created Face...

For example, it’s easy to get hung up on technology choices. This is especially true when our technology of choice is the underdog. We love the technology so much and place such a high value on defending it as a choice for adoption that we see every opportunity as a battle worth fight...

The Eight-Hour Burn 2013.07.09 One of the many sources of controversy around the Extreme Programming movement is its initial assertion that team members should work no more than forty hours per week. This kind of talk really upsets slave-driving managers who want to squeeze as much pr...

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Early in my career, a co-worker and I were flown from Memphis to Orlando to try to help end a multi-day outage of our company’s corporate Lotus Domino server. The team in Orlando had been fire-fighting for days and had gotten nowhere. I’m not sure why they thought my co-worker and I c...

It makes us stupid . The more I work, the less relevant my years of experience become. I constantly make rookie mistakes. I break things in production. I leave messes behind. I waste hours going down the wrong train of thought. It burns people out, sometimes permanently. They burn up ...

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It makes us stupid . The more I work, the less relevant my years of experience become. I constantly make rookie mistakes. I break things in production. I leave messes behind. I waste hours going down the wrong train of thought. It burns people out, sometimes permanently. They burn up ...

Related:

TL;DR - Empathy is the most important skill you can practice. It will lead to greater success personally and professionally and will allow you to become happier the more you practice. I’ve never considered myself a real programmer. I know at this point it’s probably silly to say, but ...

The first time I was invited to give a keynote speech, I thought “Why would they want me? I have nothing to say.” The second time was a few months later. Same thing. What should I talk about? What’s worth listening to? Previously I had been asked by my favorite publisher to write a bo...

Primum non nocere, or “first, do no harm” is a universal principle among healthcare professionals worldwide. It essentially means this: given a (bad) situation, your first priority is to not make it worse through your actions. Doctors hold a position of power over their patients. Most...

TL;DR - Empathy is the most important skill you can practice. It will lead to greater success personally and professionally and will allow you to become happier the more you practice. I’ve never considered myself a real programmer. I know at this point it’s probably silly to say, but ...

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For the first several years of my career in IT, I spent a lot of time thinking about what I’d rather be doing while at work. I might be in a meeting, talking about how to improve the uptime of a billing system. Or putting together time cards for a weekly report. Or programming in a la...

Have you heard of Stockholm Syndrome? It’s a name given to the condition wherein hostages develop positive feelings toward their captors despite being held in negative, unfavorable and even life-threatening conditions. Victims of Stockholm Syndrome will even inexplicably stay with the...

I’m Chad Fowler. I write books , write and play music , write software (currently for 6Wunderkinder, in Berlin ), speak , teach , learn, organize conferences, etc. I started and co-organized a couple of Ruby-related conferences including The International Ruby Conference and RailsConf...

When you create art, the purpose is self-expression. When you create software, the purpose is rarely self-expression. When you create software, someone somewhere wants it to perform a set of functions and has a stake in how well those functions are implemented. The definition of “well...

Don't Put All Your Eggs in Someone Else's Basket 2013.07.09 (Excerpt from The Passionate Programmer: Creating a Remarkable Career in Software Development) While managing an application development group, I once asked one of my employees, “What do you want to do with your career? What ...

(Excerpt from The Passionate Programmer: Creating a Remarkable Career in Software Development) I started my career as a computer programmer because of video games. Since the days of loading games from tape on my Commodore 64, I’ve been hooked by their immersive, interactive experience...

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As I mentioned last week, I’m releasing chapters of The Passionate Programmer every(ish) week until they’ve all been posted. This week’s chapter is one I actually re-read myself sometimes as a reminder. It’s about how to stay calm and focused in the face of stress. It’s one of the mos...

Six years ago, I gave up a bad habit. Since 1999 I had been using RSS then Atom as my interesting-stuff changelog. I eventually amassed a subscription collection of hundreds of feeds with subjects ranging from the obvious (tech news and software development) to religion, philosophy, l...

The South Indian Monkey Trap 2013.07.09 (Excerpt from The Passionate Programmer: Creating a Remarkable Career in Software Development) In Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into Values , Robert Pirsig tells an enlightening story about how people in South India used ...

Starting today I’m going to post a free excerpt from The Passionate Programmer every week (time permitting) until I’ve posted them all. (Thanks to my generous publisher for allowing this!) If you have read it and wished you could share sections with friends and co-workers that don’t o...